


Suptober Day 24: Family Business

by tiamatv



Series: Promptober 2020 [23]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Castiel and Dean Winchester and Sam Winchester are Jack Kline's Parents, Cereal, Cooking Lessons, Domesticity in the Men of Letters Bunker (Supernatural), M/M, Season/Series 14, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:42:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27188111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tiamatv/pseuds/tiamatv
Summary: “It's just like spellwork!" Jack says, watching very seriously as Dean fluffs the flour with a whisk.“Better. Spellwork you can eat,” Dean agrees.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Series: Promptober 2020 [23]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1954990
Comments: 36
Kudos: 206





	Suptober Day 24: Family Business

**Author's Note:**

> So apparently when I don't know what to write, I write the boyos being dads to Jack, each in their own sweet way.
> 
> (Almost caught up! Time to go to sleep, now...)

Cas, mostly, can’t cook.

He’ll still eat, now and again, but Dean knows that’s because he wants to, not because he has to, and it’s probably not even anything to do with taste (molecules don’t sound like they taste any good). He always looks just a little sad about it when he’s taking a bite of something that Dean suspects he really, really liked in his short time human—burritos, for example. He’ll still polish off a good half of a burger, though, and always wants the french fries that fall to the bottom of the takeout bag—the ones that are floppy and extra-salty.

Dean knows Cas is really getting into this whole being-a-dad thing when he starts offering them to Jack, first.

(Jack isn’t interested, but that ain’t the point.)

The one thing Cas makes really well? Some kind of southeast Asian chicken and rice soup. It’s got some kind of ginger in it, and the rice melts right into the broth. Fried garlic on top. It looks absolutely disgusting, like chicken noodle soup and rice pudding had a baby, but it smells so good that people were making excuses to poke their heads into the kitchen. It is fucking _delicious._ Cas made a big pot of it back when they first thought Jack was getting his first cold, and they were _all_ eating it.

Dean’s pretty sure the one and only reason Cas got so good at it _so fast_ was that he thought Jack needed it. He wouldn’t do that for himself—or, for that matter, for anyone else.

And then there’s Sam. Who _thinks_ he can cook, and that’s even worse, somehow. Salad assembly isn’t cooking. Neither is adding toppings to plain, unsweetened yoghurt.

“What are you doing, Dean?” Jack asks, curiously, as Dean pulls the flour jar down from the cupboard. Their Nephilim—former Nephilim?—makes a small, happy noise when he sees the fresh box of Krunch Kookie Crunch (okay, Dean might not have graduated high school, but even he finds that spelling sort of offensive) sitting next to the dry goods. He bumps over to reach for it.

Dean swats his hand. Gently! Kid’s human now, after all.

“Ow,” Jack grumbles, pulling it back.

“Not now. You’ll ruin your appetite,” Dean tells him, firmly.

Then he pauses. Fuck, was that a dad voice? That was a dad voice.

Jack frowns. “But an appetite isn’t like teeth,” he says.

What? “Teeth?” Dean asks, blankly.

“Well, yes,” Jack answers, looking just as confused as Dean. “When you ruin your teeth, they don’t grow back. But I’ll always have an appetite! Even if I eat and then I’m not hungry for a little while, it’ll come back later,” he points out. Then he raises his head like he’s just got the best idea ever. “And _Cas_ lets me eat them.”

Oh, so it’s like that, is it? Jesus, kid’s already learning to play his parents off against each other. Unluckily for Jack, though, there’s _three_ of them. “Does Sam?” ‘Cause Dean’s getting an idea of where that ‘tooth ruining’ thing was coming from.

Jack deflates. “Um,” he mumbles.

Dean laughs, and bumps him with a foot as he’s bringing down the sugar and the baking powder. He carries everything, balanced carefully, to the kitchen island. “Hey, kid, you do what you want to, no-one’s gonna _stop_ you if you’ve put your mind to it. Just remember, Cas is an angel.”

Jack’s eyebrows tilt in. “Okay?”

“That means he once believed me when I told him ketchup is a vegetable, and got drunk off an entire damned liquor store,” Dean answers, and gestures impatiently to Jack. “Pancakes or waffles?”

Jack stops peeking resentful glances at the box of Krunch Kookie Crunch, and his eyes go wide the way Cas’s did over that tiny bottle of sage honey that Dean spotted at the Lebanon co-op the other week. Dean had to stop the guy from eating it with a spoon. Mostly for Dean’s own sanity.

“Waffles, please,” Jack says, meekly, standing very straight and still with his chin neutral. “I think they’re my new favorite.”

He looks so, so much like Cas when he does that that it sort of stutters Dean’s heart a little. Of course the kid’s got no relation whatsoever to Cas _or_ Cas’s vessel, but that doesn’t make it any less real. “Okay, well, then you gotta get over here.” He flicks his fingers, beckoning in Jack’s direction again.

Jack sort of edges over towards him, looking around like he thinks that the waffles are going to come crawling out from under the countertop or maybe drop from the ceiling, like spiders. “They’re Sam’s favorite, too,” he says, as if Dean doesn’t know that better than almost anyone.

Dean can’t help it—he laughs, and pushes the jar of flour towards him, going to get milk and eggs from the fridge. “Well, good, you can tell the nerd that you learned how to make waffles today.” He grins. “And then you’ll be able to do something _neither_ Sam or Cas can do.”

Jack’s eyes go so wide that whites show all around the blue of them. “Really?” He chews on his lower lip for a second, hesitant. Dean blinks, because, okay, his face and Jack’s aren’t much alike at all, but that gesture sort of looks a lot like… Dean. “But… I can’t even get my coffee to taste right, anymore,” he finishes, sadly.

Then he breaks off into one of the jags of that little dry cough tickle he’s had a few weeks now. Dean pulls back the measuring cup he was about to offer him, and points him—not unsympathetically; it really sucks to have a cough—towards the sink to wash his hands again before they get going.

But when Jack comes back, Dean pokes him with the measuring cup again until he takes it. “That’s the magic of baking, Jack. Most of the time you put together the recipe and you mostly hope that whoever wrote it knows what they were doing, and you know? A lot of the time, they kind of do.” Dean shrugs. “I mean, it’s beyond me, it’s all proportions and chemistry an’ stuff. But it works.” He pulls the big metal mixing bowl out from underneath the countertop. “Do you want the crunchy waffles or the soft ones?”

Jack wrinkles his nose. “Why would I want the soft ones?” he asks.

“Good man.” Dean claps him gently on the shoulder. “Now, I want you to measure out two and a fourth cups of flour—ah, ah!” He stops Jack just as the kid, like probably every single person who’s just started to learn how to bake since the history of modern cooking, jams the measuring cup right into the flour. “You don’t have to taste anything, but you do have to put everything together in the right way. Otherwise it doesn’t turn out right.”

“Like spellwork!’ Jack says, watching very seriously as Dean fluffs the flour back up again with the whisk, then gently spoons the measuring cup full and levels off the top with the back of a knife. Jack very carefully tips it into the measuring bowl, and only gets a little bit on himself.

“Better. Spellwork you can _eat_ ,” Dean agrees. He has to turn his back to hide his smile and pretend to be looking for the cinnamon he pulled out earlier, when he sees that Jack is concentrating so hard on scooping out the flour into the measuring cup _just right_ that he’s got the tip of his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth. “Damn sight better than most of the shit we do, if you ask me.”

Jack bobs his chin. “I bet it explodes less,” he says, seriously. “And smells better.”

Well, they’ll talk about Winchester Surprise when Jack’s feeling a little more confident in his cooking skills overall. Dean hands him the sugar, next, and the clattering ring of measuring spoons. “Three tablespoons of that,” he instructs, “just like you did with the flour.”

By the time Jack’s got the salt, baking powder and cinnamon all in the bowl, though, he’s not smiling anymore. Though some of that might have been that he got a little too excited with the whisk, and the ghost impression is pretty eerie. Dean thinks he might have gotten flour _inside_ his shirt.

“I don’t understand how diners do this, the measuring part takes so long and we haven’t even started cooking yet,” Jack complains.

Actually, that sounds like someone’s starting to get a little hangry. Dean considers giving him just a handful of the cereal, but… nah. “Most of ‘em make things in bulk, or they measure by weight,” Dean answers, and grins. “Next part’s the secret part, though. You can’t tell Sam. Or Cas, but especially Sam.”

Jack’s eyes go wide again as Dean sends one of the eggs spinning across the countertop towards him. He catches it in both hands, holding them like a hockey net to keep the egg from falling over the edge. “Sam doesn’t _know_?” he breathes.

“Nah.”

But suddenly, Jack looks sad, soft-eyed—which is really fucking pathetic-looking in a kid who’s got flour mix whitening up the drape of hair on his forehead. “Because Mary could teach you but she couldn’t teach him?”

Dean stalls on that one, blinking. Okay, that jump of logic wouldn’t have occurred to him. He rests a hand on the egg he’s been passing back and forth between his own palms. “What?”

“Because she died,” Jack adds, helpfully. “She still feels bad about that.”

Jack really does say the damnedest things, sometimes. “Most people really don’t get a choice ‘bout dying,” Dean observes. Shit, even those who _do_ get a choice about it don’t always use that choice the right way. “So it’s not like it’s something she _should_ feel bad about. Anyway. Okay, now, watch this okay?”

He pops the egg gently against the wooden countertop, then spills its cold, slippery contents into one of his hands. The white runs cold through his fingers and drips into the empty bowl he’s got underneath them. He plops the yolk off into a separate bowl to the side. “Now you try.”

The look on Jack’s face makes it clear that he thinks this is probably more spell components than it is cooking, but after a little fumbling—and Dean getting him to _not_ crack the egg on the edge of the table and drive eggshells into it—he watches the clear yellow drip between his fingers until he’s got the little orange sun in the cup of his hand. He bobbles it around in his fingers for a few seconds before giving Dean a pleased look. “I did it!” he announces. Then, with equal excitement, “Why did I do that?”

Dean chuckles as he guides Jack’s hand over to the other bowl and dumps the yolk in with its twin. “You just separated an egg, and that’s the secret to making really crunchy, fluffy waffles, not the kind that get soft right out of the waffle iron.”

He guides Jack to whisking together some oil, milk, vanilla and the yolks. When the kid looks like he’s not gonna splash all over himself the way he did with the flour mix (he’s going to need a shower before breakfast) Dean says, “I taught myself, mostly.” He shrugs. “And I worked a whole bunch of jobs in the backs of kitchens, if we were ever anyplace for long enough. Picked up some stuff. Mom didn’t teach me any of this, Jack.”

Jack glances up and Dean points a finger back at the bowl. Jack looks down at his mixture again and resumes stirring. “Even though she’s your _mom_?”

Dean feels his hackles growl upwards at that, but he nudges them back down. Dean _could_ tell Jack that not everyone can figure out cooking at two years old, the way Jack here is doing, but that’s not the point. Besides, the kid _knows_ Mary Winchester. Not a single one of the four of them grew up with a mom, and isn’t that the weirdest, most fucked-up thing? “Every mom is different, I guess. And mine’s a really bad cook.”

“That’s what everyone at camp said,” Jack says, sweetly loyal, “I didn’t believe them. But I also didn’t need to eat.” Artlessly, he asks, “What about your dad? Was he like you and Sam?”

“I don’t know… maybe in some ways.” Dean smiles, a little sadly. “Too busy teaching me an’ Sam the family business. And I hear he was a pretty rotten cook, too. Anyway, we didn’t have a nice place like this to learn, then.” He takes the bowl away from Jack and directs him towards the hand mixer. He was thinking about a stand mixer, before, but it just seemed so stupid when their family wasn’t _complete_. Now, though? Maybe. “So, okay, now we’re going to whip the egg whites…”

He shows Jack the difference between foam, soft peaks and firm peaks to the comforting whirr of the little electric hand mixer. Jack watches greedily as Dean folds the egg whites into the rest of the batter mixture, making sure not to knock the air out; Dean’s already promised him he can do it next time, all the way down to the last step.

“Gotta make a tester,” he tells Jack, and pops open the hot waffle iron, handing him the ladle. “We can split one.”

Jack frowns, but he takes the ladle and gingerly scoops up a big blop of the creamy, bubbling, sweet-smelling mix. “Isn’t _that_ ‘ruining our appetite,’ too?”

Okay, the fucking air quotes. Jack is not allowed to inherit those from Cas. That’s another conversation, though. “It’s not ruining your appetite if you made it,” Dean announces. “You gotta taste it and make sure it’s good enough for everyone else to eat.”

Jack chews on his bottom lip, but he carefully pours the ladleful into the center of the waffle iron. Dean lets him close it and flip it—Jack takes a deep breath afterwards like that was stressful. “But what if it isn’t?” Jack finally asks, as the cooking light blinks on.

“If it’s good enough for you to eat, you eat it. If it’s so bad that you can’t eat it, you make it again.” Dean shrugs. “That’s the good part about cooking. You can always make it again.”

Jack watches, very intent, as Dean uses a spatula to wipe away the little bits of waffle goo that always ooze out the edge of the waffle iron. They clear the space in comfortable silence, lifting jars up to the cupboards and digging out maple syrup—fuck _yeah,_ they use the real thing; Dean’s not a savage—and peanut butter—Dean’s kind of into it, but Cas _loves_ it on his waffles.

(Now that Dean thinks about it, he probably should have offered Jack a spoonful of _that_ if he was getting grouchy earlier. Well, lessons learned and all that shit.)

“Dean, we’re family, right?” Jack announces, a little too loudly. He sounds pleased.

Dean nods. “Sure.” As an afterthought, he turns the oven on. Gotta keep the waffles warm while they’re waiting for the rest to cook. Or maybe Jack can just go call the others down, they can damned well sit and wait for their waffles to be done rather than Dean—and Jack—trying to serve everyone all at once…

“And that’s why you’re teaching me to cook.”

That makes Dean chuckle a little, and he glances over his shoulder at Jack’s grave expression. “One of the reasons,” he jokes, and points with his toes to get Jack to carry the rest of the dirty bowls into the sink. Sam’s turn to wash— _score._ “It’d be nice to not have to be the only one doing it ‘round here.”

Jack puffs up a little, proudly—standing in the middle of an underground secure bunker in his fluffy red sweatshirt, patched with flour, and jeans that they had to buy him because he’s shorter and skinnier than any of his three dads. “And I’m a hunter, now, too,” he announces. “I’m an _adult_!”

Oh, slow your horses, Nellie. “I would not go _that_ far,” Dean teases, just to make Jack squint at him. Should he make bacon? Dammit, he should, but they’ve only got Sam’s veggie bacon left in the fridge, and Dean isn’t touching _that_.

Jack—sure enough—squints, but then he asks, “So how come you and Castiel don’t kiss in front of me?”

Dean drops his spatula.

“What?” he sputters. In the process of trying to grab the spatula, he somehow ends up kicking it across the floor instead. Since he’s not going to go chasing after it bent over, he straightens, but that puts him almost nose-to-nose with a certain innocent little brunet spawn of the Devil with a stubborn, small pointed chin.

“You can, you know. You have my blessing,” Jack says, seriously. He picks up the spatula and hands it back to Dean. “If that’s what’s stopping you. I know Castiel and my mom weren’t _that_ way. Like you and him are.”

Holy Jesus fucking Christ in a cowboy hat. “I. Uh, no, they…” Cas and Kelly Kline? To be honest, that thought never crossed Dean’s mind. Not for a second. Not even knowing that Jack considered Castiel his father even when he was in Kelly’s _stomach._ Cas just never looked at Kelly like that, it’s nothing like the way Cas looks at—

“No,” Dean finishes a little too hastily.

‘Like you and him are?’ What the fuck does that mean? _How_ are they, exactly?

“It’s not that I think you _require_ my blessing, but just… in general,” Jack continues, like he has no idea that Dean’s brain is about to go leaking out of his ears and his heart is clocking so fast it’s got its own RPM. “Blessings are nice things. That’s what Sam says, anyway? And you two deserve them.”

“You asked _Sam_ about this?” Dean’s voice rockets higher than he thought it could go.

Jack blinks. “Of course,” he answers, frowning gently. “You told me to go to him for the ‘emotional bullshit.’”

Yeah, and Dean’s both severely regretting that decision and completely understanding it, because he can’t deal with this particular emotional bullshit right now, he _really can’t_. He clears his throat and makes sure he’s not going to put his hand down on a hot waffle iron, a live stove, a knife out of its sheath, or any of the invisible barbed wire that currently seems like it’s _all around him_ before he leans heavily against the countertop.

“Cas and I don’t have that kind of relationship, kiddo,” he finally squeezes out. Isn’t this waffle done yet? Goddammit, it’s just supposed to take, what, five minutes? He stares at the little light on the waffle iron like he can make it go faster. “The, uh… yeah.”

He’s not gonna say ‘the kissing kind.’ Like he’s still half-angel, Jack seems to hear it anyway.

“Don’t you want to?” Jack asks, so fucking _guilelessly_.

Dean closes his eyes. “That’s…”

It’d be so easy to lie. Dean’s been lying about it for years. To himself, at first; to everyone else, after. About fucking all of it. About wanting a kiss so bad he realizes he’s staring at those weirdly shaped, unique lips—about dreaming of scruff against his—about remembering what Cas feels like pressed against his front, or even just standing so close Dean can’t focus on his features. About thinking what it might be like to have his arm draped over tight, close hipbones when he falls asleep, messy hair tucked under his chin.

He could lie.

Lying’s so easy.

“It’s complicated,” Dean sighs.

Even he knows you’re not supposed to lie to your kids about the really big shit. That’ll just come back and bite you in the ass in the long run. Dean knows that better than _anyone_.

“Because you’re a Winchester?”

Yes. No. Maybe. Dean can’t decide if Jack’s persistence about all this is angelic, demonic, or _Winchester_. But maybe part of whatever tiny flecks of Jack’s grace are left in him recognize that Dean’s a man on the edge who did not fucking expect to get suddenly dragged out of his comfortable angel closet by his teenage kid, only to find out that it’s possible everyone _else_ already knew, too.

He doesn’t answer.

But Jack doesn’t say anything else about it, thank God, and the happy little squeak he makes when Dean opens the waffle maker—and lets Jack lever their tester waffle out with a fork, thank God they remembered to grease the waffle iron this time, the time they didn’t was _not fun_ —make the rest of that talk seem like a really weird dream.

“Can this be part of the family business, too?” Jack asks, hopefully, looking up from where he’s smearing his half of the waffle with a truly unholy amount of peanut butter, and just a tiny trickle of syrup. Kid is weird, no mistake. “You know… saving people, hunting things… making waffles? The next family business. _Our_ family business.”

Dean clears his throat from where he’s got a little flour caught in it, or something. “Thought that’s exactly what we were doing here,” he tells Jack, gruffly, gesturing around the kitchen.

“Oh.” Jack considers. “Oh, okay. That’s good.” He starts dissecting the rest of his peanut buttery waffle into little strips, then looks up again, frowning. “Dean?”

“Hmm?” Dean takes the first big bite of his waffle, each little cup filled to the brim with syrup and peanut butter. The walls crunch and break delicately between his teeth, flooding his mouth with sweetness. Oh, _damn_ , that’s good.

“Can you promise me something?”

“You know better’n to ask me that without telling me what you want me to promise,” Dean answers, amused, his mouth full.

“Can you at least think about it? The kissing. Because…” Jack shakes his head and licks a blob of peanut butter off the tip of his knife (he really needs to pick up table manners from the other two, not Dean). “Cas deserves to be happy, too. You know?”

Dean swallows. “Okay,” he says, hoarsely.

Jack doesn’t seem to need any clarification about that—which is good, ‘cause Dean’s pretty sure he couldn’t give any without exploding into a million bits all over the bunker floor like he just got smote by an archangel.

“Dean?”

Oh, holy fucking shit.

“Yeah?” Dean answers, cramming his mouth full with the next bite as fast as he can, and even he can hear a squeak of desperation in his voice. Whoever said parenting was easy—actually, he’s pretty sure no-one in their right mind has ever said that, never mind.

Jack gives him a slow, serious, deliberate look down his nose, all studious angelic poise, and folds his hands in front of him before he asks, “Who bought my Kookie Crunch?”

Dean takes his time to chew and swallow. And breathe again. “Don’t tell your other dads,” he says, pointing a warning finger at their kid, “or I won’t buy it for you anymore.”

“We get to keep the _best_ secrets,” Jack sighs happily, and digs into his waffle.

~fin~

**Author's Note:**

> Cas's signature dish is lugaw, which is a Filipino rice and ginger porridge--a similar texture to congee or okayu, but it's made with stock and ginger and chicken bones and such from the beginning rather than having things added on as toppings, so it's more like chicken noodle soup than either of those others.
> 
> I firmly believe in baking by weight, but I couldn't talk myself into letting Dean do it here (maybe when he's making pie, though)...


End file.
